What Is Gas (GAS)?

GAS is a cryptocurrency belonging to the Neo platform. The Neo is a community-driven, open-source blockchain platform developed with an aim to facilitate the building of DApps (decentralized applications). According to the website of the asset, the platform’s mission is to make physical and digital assets accessible to humans with programs that minimize permission and trust. In order to fulfill this mission, the platform aims to enable developers to automate and digitize asset management using smart contracts. Besides this, the platform also seeks to provide users with other powerful infrastructures, such as the following:

• Decentralized storage: A data storage mechanism that reflects a peer-to-peer network of operators between whom the data is shared, aiming to create a resilient data-sharing and storage system.

• One block finality: A mechanism that seeks to ensure efficient and fast transactions to be completed within a single block of the blockchain while being fault-tolerant.

• Oracle: A computable mechanism that aims to provide secure access to off-chain data. Off-chain data are large non-transactional data that cannot be efficiently stored in the blockchain.

• NEOFS: A distributed storage solution that seeks to provide privacy and facilitate data scalability.

• Poly Network: A cross-chain network infrastructure that aims to facilitate interoperability between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, etc.

• Neo Name Service: A decentralized domain name service for web applications.

• Neo ID: A decentralized identity solution.

These infrastructures allow the platform to fulfill its vision of an open network smart economy by laying a solid foundation for the next-generation internet. Further, to facilitate transactions on the platform and allow users to access the infrastructures of the platform, Neo has introduced its cryptocurrency, the GAS token.

The GAS is the native fuel token of the platform and is used for all transactional purposes on the platform. Some of the major utilities of the GAS token aim to be the following:

• Purchasing products and services on the platform

• Paying a network fee for accessing the services on the platform

• Medium of compensation for transferring, publishing, and registering assets on the platform

• Medium of compensation for running DApps on the platform 

• Rewarding NEO token holders on the platform – (NEO token is another native token of the NEO platform used for governance, voting, claiming GAS, and decision-making on the platform.)

Thus, these utilities of the GAS token seek to help facilitate a smooth operating structure on the platform.

History of Gas (GAS)

Neo, the platform for the GAS token, was founded by Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang in 2014 under the name Antshares. In 2017, Antshares was rebranded as Neo.